Meet The "Little" Browne Team

By Lianne Shields, corps member serving on the Comcast Team at Browne Education Campus

Everyday around 7:50am on 26th street NE, you can usually see a flood of red walking up the steps of both Browne Education Campus and Spingarn High School. With two teams serving at Browne and a large team at Spingarn down the street, there are twenty-nine red jackets on one block, with every grade encountering City Year’s services.

Here at Browne Education Campus, we are lucky enough to have two City Year teams dedicated to improving students’ academics, behavior, and community. The team that serves the elementary grades is affectionately referred to as “Little Browne” while the team in the middle school space is called “Big Browne” (To find out more about Big Browne tune in later this week for Gabi Cabido Carr’s spotlight).

Little Browne is made up of eight energetic and unique individuals. If there is one thing our team can definitely do, it is make each other laugh. When the days are long and stressful, it is nice to be able to laugh and have fun with my team. From a far we seem like a normal group of 17 – 24 year olds, but step into Room 235 and you’ll experience what Little Browne really is….

At Little Browne, our door is always opening and closing. Three corps members run small groups and one-on-one tutoring sessions in our City Year room, which means that certain students spend a lot of time in our room. Having those few kids in the room with multiple corps members really allows us to build a community with the students. Their experience with City Year isn’t only with the corps member placed in the classroom but with the whole team.

At 11:15am the lunch rotation has start. Recess and lunch clubs are rotated between grades and for the next hour different lunch groups meet together in various locations around the campus. Sometimes corps members combine clubs and infuse our students’ favorite thing, dance, into the club activities.
After lunch, our planning periods are filled with laughs, meetings and preparing for after school programs. The afternoons fly by with math tutoring and our power-hour of homework help starting at 3:30pm. Clubs start at 4:45pm after snack and for the next hour, we engage our students in art, music, technology, photography and Starfish programs.

The best part of our day is when we can spend time with our students and get to see their personalities, talents, and individuality. The 450 students at Browne Education Campus are full of potential, humor, love and determination. Despite any challenges we as individuals face, I can honestly say that as a team, it is these students that bring Hank, Meagan, Paul, Gabi, Graeme, Barbara, Doug, Erin and I back to Browne every day.